Weekend Leadership Reading: 5/3/19

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Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms.

From Henrik Bresman and Deborah Ancona: How Leaders Can Maximise Their Impact

“Effective leaders need to know whether their ‘people hat’ or ‘P&L hat’ fits most comfortably.”

From Bill George: These 4 CEOs Created a New Standard of Leadership

“Four titans who defined a new era in business during the past decade recently concluded their terms: PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Unilever’s Paul Polman, Mayo Clinic’s John Noseworthy, and US Bancorp’s Richard Davis.”

From Natasha Ouslis: Trust in Leadership – One Key Factor During Organizational Change

“Change is a constant in large and small organizations. Unfortunately, not all change management programmes are successful, and not all employees are on board with change. Human Resource Management in 1995 reported that managing change was considered the most important skill across 2,000 HR managers, helping their success more than HR and business knowledge. Change management practitioners in Forbes and Strategy + Business claim that leaders are important for successful organizational change – but is this true? And if leaders are important, how do leaders gain their employees’ trust to create the change they need? More fundamentally, what do we know about trust in leadership? We will explore these questions below.”

From Rebecca Zucker: Why Highly Efficient Leaders Fail

“With ever-increasing demands at work for both mid-level and senior leaders, the ability to execute and get things done is a key driver of success. But it can ultimately become a leader’s downfall, resulting in unintended costs for the individual, as well as for their teams and organizations.”

From Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: As Long as We Associate Leadership with Masculinity, Women Will Be Overlooked

“In an ideal world, leaders would follow science-based practices and prioritize engaging with and inspiring their employees, and providing them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Instead, we continue to see that the average performance of leaders and managers is pretty disappointing. More bosses are contributing to burnout, anxiety, boredom, and productivity losses than driving top team or organizational performance.”

From Mike Walsh: Why Leaders Need to Think More Like Professional Gamblers

“This post is by Mike Walsh. Walsh is the author of The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You from which this article is excerpted. Walsh is the CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy on designing companies for the 21 st century.”

Book Suggestions

X-Teams: How To Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, And Succeed by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman

Discover Your True North by Bill George

The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey

Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein

Personality at Work: The Drivers and Derailers of Leadership by Ronald Warren

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than Youby Mike Walsh

Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to the most recent post: a review of Bedtime Stories for Managers by Henry Mintzberg.

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